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      Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote

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      A central figure in the scheme to reverse the 2020 election is mobilizing grass-roots activists into an “army of citizens” trained to aggressively monitor elections.In a hotel conference center outside Harrisburg, Pa., Cleta Mitchell, one of the key figures in a failed scheme to overturn Donald J. Trump’s defeat, was leading a seminar on “election integrity.”“We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again,” Ms. Mitchell told the crowd of about 150 activists-in-training.She would be “putting you to work,” she told them.In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. Mitchell was among a cadre of Republican lawyers who frantically compiled unsubstantiated accusations, debunked claims and an array of confusing and inconclusive eyewitness reports to build the case that the election was marred by fraud. Courts rejected the cases and election officials were unconvinced, thwarting a stunning assault on the transfer of power.Now Ms. Mitchell is prepping for the next election. Working with a well-funded network of organizations on the right, including the Republican National Committee, she is recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections.In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work. She has tapped into a network of grass-root groups that promote misinformation and espouse wild theories about the 2020 election, including the fiction that President Biden’s victory could still be decertified and Mr. Trump reinstated.One concern is the group’s intent to research the backgrounds of local and state officials to determine whether each is a “friend or foe” of the movement. Many officials already feel under attack by those who falsely contend that the 2020 election was stolen.An extensive review of Ms. Mitchell’s effort, including documents and social media posts, interviews and attendance at the Harrisburg seminar, reveals a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures. They include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as the Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation.Ms. Mitchell says she is creating “a volunteer army of citizens” who can counter what she describes as Democratic bias in election offices.“We’re going to be watching. We’re going to take back our elections,” she said in an April interview with John Fredericks, a conservative radio host. “The only way they win is to cheat,” she added.The claim that Mr. Trump lost the election because of improper conduct in election offices or rampant voter fraud is false. Mr. Trump’s defeat was undisputed among election officials and certified by Democrats and Republicans, with many recounts and audits verifying the outcome. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department found no evidence of widespread fraud. Mr. Trump lost more than 50 of his postelection challenges in court.Campaigns, parties and outside groups from both sides of the political spectrum regularly form poll-monitoring operations and recruit poll workers. And Republicans have in the past boasted of plans to build an “army” of observers, raising fears about widespread voter intimidation and conflict at the polls that largely have not materialized.Some former election officials say they are hopeful that when election skeptics observe the process they may finally be convinced that the system is sound. But several who examined Ms. Mitchell’s training materials and statements at the request of The New York Times sounded alarms about her tactics.Ms. Mitchell’s trainings promote particularly aggressive methods — with a focus on surveillance — that appear intended to feed on activists’ distrust and create pressure on local officials, rather than ensure voters’ access to the ballot, they say. A test drive of the strategy in the Virginia governor’s race last year highlighted how quickly the work — when conducted by people convinced of falsehoods about fraud — can disrupt the process and spiral into bogus claims, even in a race Republicans won.“I think it’s going to come down to whether they are truly interested in knowing the truth about elections or they’re interested in propagating propaganda,” said Al Schmidt, a Republican and former city commissioner of Philadelphia who served on the elections board.Asked about her project at the Pennsylvania training, Ms. Mitchell declined an interview request and asked a reporter to leave.In a statement emailed later, she said: “The American election system envisions citizen engagement and we are training people to assume the roles outlined in the statutes.”Ms. Mitchell’s operation sits at a tension point for her party. While the establishment is eager to take advantage of the base’s energy and outrage over 2020, some are wary of being associated with — or held accountable for — some of the more extreme people in the movement. The feeling is mutual among activists, many of whom believe the R.N.C. did not do enough to back Mr. Trump’s challenge.The Republican National Committee’s involvement is part of a return to widespread election-work organizing. For nearly 30 years, the committee was limited in some operations by a consent decree after Democrats accused party officials in New Jersey of hiring off-duty police officers and posting signs intended to scare Black and Latino people away from voting. The committee was freed of restrictions in 2018.This year, its multimillion-dollar investment includes hiring 18 state “election integrity” directors and 19 state “election integrity” lawyers. The party has so far recruited more than 5,000 poll watchers and nearly 12,000 poll workers, according to the committee. These efforts are separate from the Election Integrity Network, said Emma Vaughn, an R.N.C. spokeswoman.But in multiple states, the R.N.C. election integrity directors have been involved in Ms. Mitchell’s events. Ms. Vaughn acknowledged that party officials participate in events hosted by other groups to recruit poll workers and poll watchers. She noted that in many states poll monitors must be authorized by the party. The R.N.C. is training its monitors to comply with laws protecting voting rights, she said.“The R.N.C. works with other groups who have an interest in promoting election integrity, but the party’s efforts are independent from any outside organization,” Ms. Vaughn said.Harnessing the EnergySince 2020, scores of local groups have popped up around the country to promote claims about the election. Many are run by activists with little experience in politics or elections but who have amassed sizable membership lists and social media followers. They are spurred on by national figures touring the circuit and spreading false claims.Ms. Mitchell stepped in to harness that energy.The 71-year-old lawyer has been a steady and influential force in the voting battles. Once a liberal Democrat in Oklahoma, Ms. Mitchell has been a fixture in the conservative movement. She has represented the National Rifle Association and was on the board of the American Conservative Union. She has worked closely with Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, on organizing through the Council for National Policy, a national coordinating group for conservative leaders.In August 2020, Mr. Trump tapped her to prepare for postelection litigation. She enlisted John Eastman, the lawyer who crafted specious legal theories claiming Vice President Mike Pence could keep Mr. Trump in power. “A movement is stirring,” Ms. Mitchell wrote to Mr. Eastman just two days after Election Day. “But needs constitutional support.”Ms. Mitchell helped the president argue his case to state officials. She was on the phone with Mr. Trump when he asked Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” that could reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat there.Her latest effort is organized through the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit organization where she serves as a senior legal fellow and where Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, is a senior partner. Mr. Trump’s political action committee, Save America PAC, donated $1 million to the group last year.Ms. Mitchell has described herself as a key conduit between activists and Republican Party leadership.“We are trying to bridge the gap between the grassroots and some of the issues we’ve had with the party,” she told trainees at the event outside Harrisburg.Ms. Mitchell is no doubt connecting with some of the fringe groups and ideas some in the party once avoided.In Virginia, for example, Ms. Mitchell helped a nonprofit organize a coalition that includes Virginians for America First, a group advocating for hand-counting ballots. It’s a position popular among some of those who believe conspiracy theories about foreign hacking in the 2020 election. The group was funded by Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com executive who is now a major benefactor of the election denial movement.Mark Finchem, a state representative from Arizona, at a MAGA rally at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., in March.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesIn Michigan, Ms. Mitchell’s group held a training session in May that was sponsored in part by a coalition of grass-roots groups called the Michigan Election Protection Team. The R.N.C.’s state election integrity director brought together the coalition to recruit poll workers. According to its website, the coalition includes LaRouchePAC, a committee dedicated to Lyndon LaRouche, the deceased conspiracy theorist, and Let’s Fix Stuff, an outfit run by a former Republican state senator who has promoted a theory about the 2020 election that Republican Michigan Senate leaders denounced as “indefensible.”The R.N.C. sent both its national and state election integrity directors to Ms. Mitchell’s training near Harrisburg. The state director, Andrea Raffle, had worked alongside Ms. Mitchell for months on the event, one of the speakers told the attendees. Ms. Raffle, as well as an organizer from Heritage Action, would be joining a new coalition of election activists led by Toni Shuppe, a fast-rising state activist, organizers announced.Ms. Shuppe’s group, Audit the Vote PA, has become a leading peddler of misleading data about the election in Pennsylvania. Last year, the group set out to find evidence of fraud by canvassing neighborhoods in search of discrepancies between election results and information collected from residents, a method that election experts dismiss as invalid.Ms. Shuppe has admitted to flaws in her data but stands by the conclusions of her analysis. Earlier this year, she circulated a petition that declared citizens’ right “to throw off such government that intends to keep the truth behind the 2020 election hidden.”Now, Ms. Shuppe is recruiting election activists, using what she learned at Ms. Mitchell’s and other training sessions, she said in an interview. So far, around 200 people have signed up, she said.“Just know that we have a plan,” she wrote the day after the Harrisburg seminar to her 15,000 Telegram subscribers. “We’ll never quit. This must be fixed. There is no going back to sleep. And 2020 still needs decertified.”Election workers in Philadelphia sorting through ballots the day after Election Day in 2020.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times‘Is That a Friend or Foe?’Much of Ms. Shuppe’s plan is laid out in “The Citizens Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure,” a 19-page manual Ms. Mitchell has distributed at trainings and online.The document includes some typical guidelines for poll monitors, but elections experts also noted tactics that aren’t routine. The manual advises activists to “be ever-present” inside elections offices, and to meet with post office officials to observe “every step” of the vote-by-mail process allowed by law. They’re advised to keep careful records, including details on any “encounter that is intended to make you uncomfortable being at the election offices.”They recommend aggressively crowdsourcing the accuracy of the voter rolls by collecting affidavits from residents and mailing letters to try to identify potential “bad addresses.” They advise each group to enlist tech-savvy volunteers who, they suggest, can become expert on the specific software and equipment in each county and “what the vulnerabilities are.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

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      The MAGA Formula Is Getting Darker and Darker

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      The chilling amalgam of Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiratorial zeal — from QAnon to the “stolen” 2020 election — has attracted a substantial constituency in the United States, thanks in large part to the efforts of Donald Trump and his advisers. By some estimates, adherents of these overlapping movements make up as much as a quarter or even a third of the electorate. Whatever the scale, they are determined to restore what they see as the original racial and religious foundation of America.“While these elements are not new,” Robert Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote by email, “Donald Trump wove them together and brought them out into the open. Indeed, the MAGA formula — the stoking of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment while making nativist appeals to the Christian right — could accurately be described as a white Christian nationalist strategy from the beginning.”I asked Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” how much Christian nationalism and the great replacement theory intersect. “The answer is complex,” Stewart said. “There is definitely a wing of the Christian nationalist movement that overlaps with the Great Replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general.”At the same time, however, she continued, “there are other wings of the movement that depend less on explicitly racialized thinking and whose concerns are centered more on religious and cultural paranoia. Christian nationalism is making significant inroads among some Latino communities, for example, and there the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.”Instead of Christian nationalism, Stewart prefers the use of “religious nationalism,” which she describes asa reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the “right” religion in recovering that lost greatness. This mind-set always involves a narrative of unjust persecution at the hands of alien or “un-American” groups. The specific targets may shift. Some focus their fears on the “homosexual agenda”; others target Americans of color or nonwhite immigrant groups; still others identify the menace with religious minorities such as Muslims, Jews and secular “elites,” or perceived threats against gender hierarchy and sexual order. And of course, many take an all-of-the-above approach.According to some scholars, there are two versions of Christian nationalism, one more threatening to the social order than the other.Ruth Braunstein, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of the 2021 paper “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America,” wrote by email that Christian nationalism can be describedas adherence to a mythical vision of the United States as a “Christian nation” that must be protected and preserved. This mythology has two dimensions: it offers an account of American history that frames the country’s founding as sacred and rooted in Christian (or Judeo-Christian) values; and it defines a “real” or “good” American today as someone committed to these same values.Within that context, Braunstein continued:We can see how the great replacement theory overlaps with Christian nationalism. Both view some specific population as “real” Americans, whether that is defined explicitly as white Christians or in the more vague and coded language of “real” or “native born” or “legacy” Americans. And both frame demographic change as threats to both that population and to the country’s essential character. Finally, although not all flavors of Christian nationalism include a conspiratorial element, some versions share with replacement theory an imagined cabal of nefarious elites — often Jews, communists/socialists, or globalists — who are intentionally promoting racial and/or religious diversity in order to diminish white Christian power.Braunstein distinguishes between two variants of Christian nationalism. One she calls “white Christian nationalism” and the other “colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism.”The first, according to Braunstein, “explicitly fuses whiteness, Christianity, and Americanness,” leading to the conclusion that “white Christians alone embody the values on which a healthy democracy rests; and as such, white Christians alone are suited to hold positions of social influence and political power.”In contrast, she continued, colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalismeither ignores race or uses colorblind language to describe ideal Americanness. This has become the predominant form of Christian nationalism among mainstream conservatives. And for many conservatives, like members of the Tea Party that I studied for several years, the invocation of colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism is intended to distinguish them from groups on the racist right.Why have Christian nationalism and replacement theory moved so quickly to center stage? Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. suggested it was “twin shocks to the system” delivered during the first two decades of this century: “the election and re-election of our first Black president and the sea change of no longer being a majority-white Christian nation.” Both of these developments, Jones wrote,happened simultaneously between 2008 and 2016. White Christians went from 54 percent to 47 percent in that period, down to 44 percent today. This set the stage for Trump and the emergence of full-throated white Christian nationalism. Trump exchanged the dog whistle for the megaphone.Racial and ethnic resentment has grown far beyond the political fringes, Jones argued, citing levels of agreement in P.R.R.I. polling with the statement “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Among all voters, according to Jones, 29 percent believe that immigrants are invading our country; among Republicans, it’s 60 percent; among Democrats, 11 percent; among QAnon believers, 65 percent; among white evangelicals, 50 percent; and among white non-college voters, as pollsters put it, 43 percent.Not only that, Jones notes:White Americans who agree that “God has granted America a special role in human history” (a softer measure of Christian nationalism) are more than twice as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (28 percent vs. 11 percent). And White Americans who agree that “God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians” (a harder measure of Christian nationalism) are four times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (43 percent vs. 10 percent). And white Americans who believe that “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic values” are more than five times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (45 percent vs. 8 percent).In their January 2022 paper, “Christian Nationalism and Political Violence: Victimhood, Racial Identity, Conspiracy, and Support for the Capitol Attacks,” Miles T. Armaly of the University of Mississippi and David T. Buckley and Adam M. Enders, both of the University of Louisville, argue: “Religious ideologies like Christian nationalism should be associated with support for violence, conditional on several individual characteristics that can be inflamed by elite cues.” Those characteristics are “perceived victimhood, reinforcing racial and religious identities, and support for conspiratorial information sources.”“It’s unlikely that a single orientation or one belief was promoting the type of violent action we witnessed in Buffalo or the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Enders wrote by email. “It’s a toxic blend of extremist orientations, such as Christian nationalism, racism, some expressions of populism and conspiracism, for example, that edges individuals closer to supporting violence.”Enders went on:Christian nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, are all about identity conflict — who is morally virtuous and more deserving, who’s “normal” and even what it means to be an American. Each of these orientations is also characterized by an extreme disdain or fear of the “other.” One might look to Christianity for deeper ties between the orientations, but I think the reality is that conspiracy-minded individuals, like the accused Buffalo shooter, can find connections between anything. He saw America as a white, heterosexual, Christian country that was becoming less white, heterosexual, and Christian, thereby threatening (his perception of) the American way of life, which was his way of life. But, racism, sexism, etc. do not have any inherent connection to a desire to build a Christian nation-state.In a separate paper, Enders wrote that he and other scholars have found thatconspiracy theories, of which great replacement theory is an example, are oftentimes undergirded by antisocial personality traits, such as the dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and a predisposition toward conflict. If you combine all of these dispositions and traits and dial them up to 10, that’s when you’re most likely to find support for violence, which is correlated with (but not determinative of) behavioral violence.Armaly wrote by email that “between 25-32 percent of white Americans support some Christian nationalist ideas. We use six questions to assess the degree to which one supports Christian nationalist ideals,” including agreement or disagreement with “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” and “the success of the United States is part of God’s plan.” Around 32 percent of respondents endorse at least four statements, Armaly wrote, “and 25 percent endorse at least five statements.”Armaly noted that of “the major predictors of support for violence — perceived victimhood, attachment to one’s whiteness, racial animus toward blacks, support for authoritarianism, support for populism, and past or current military service — all, save for military service, are present in the accused Buffalo shooter’s written statement.Buckley wrote by email that6 percent of whites, 11.5 percent of white evangelicals, and 17.7 percent of white weekly church goers fall into the joint top quartile of justification of violence, Christian nationalist beliefs, perceived victimhood, white identity, and support for QAnon. That would represent millions of individuals. It also represents a far greater share of the white American population than surveys find when testing Muslim-American support for terrorism.Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiracy preoccupation overlap, although each has unique characteristics.On May 9, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released an illuminating study, “Immigration Attitudes and Conspiratorial Thinkers,” based on 4,173 interviews with adults age 18 and over, which breaks down some of the components of hard-line thinking on the right.The A.P. and NORC created two categories, “high conspiratorial thinkers” and “low conspiratorial thinkers,” based on agreement or disagreement with four statements:1) events are the product of plots executed in secret, 2) events are directed by a small group of powerful people, 3) (those people) are unknown to voters and 4) (they) control the outcome of big events like wars, recessions, and elections. The top 25 percent were placed in the high conspiracy category and the remaining 75 percent in the low conspiracy category.Comparison of the two categories of conspiratorial thinkers revealed sharp differences, according to the report:Seven times as many high conspiratorial thinkers agree that our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places (85 percent vs. 11 percent) and that big events like wars and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people working in secret (89 percent vs. 13 percent) than their low conspiratorial counterparts. High conspiratorial thinkers believe the people who run the country are not known to the voters at triple the rate of the rest of the general population (94 percent vs. 31 percent), and they are about twice as likely to agree that a few people will always run the country (96 percent vs. 48 percent).Among those ranked high in conspiratorial thinking, 42 percent agreed that there is a group of people trying to replace native-born Americans and that native-born Americans are losing economic, political and cultural influence to immigrants, compared with 8 percent of low conspiracy thinkers.In the case of white replacement theory, the report asked two questions: “There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views” (agree or disagree), and “How concerned are you that native-born Americans are losing their economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants?”The survey found significant patterns in cable news choice among those whobelieve in both the questions measuring Replacement Theory. Belief in Replacement Theory is much higher among OANN/Newsmax viewers (45 percent) and Fox News viewers (31 percent) than it is among CNN (13 percent) or MSNBC viewers (11 percent).Who are the people who fall into the high conspiracy theory category? “Nearly 6 in 10 white high conspiratorial thinkers identify as Republicans,” the report says, “and more than half voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.” Based on the racial resentment scale, the survey found that 55 percent of white high conspiratorial thinkers score in the top 25th percentile of racial resentment, compared with 21 percent of white low conspiratorial thinkers.Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who has written extensively about Christian nationalism with Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University, observed in an email that “there is tremendous overlap between Christian nationalism and The Great Replacement theory.”Perry and Whitehead have found:White Americans who affirm Christian nationalist views are quite concerned with whites losing their majority status in the United States. They are also very concerned with low birthrates and believe that we need to return to a day when Americans had more babies. This is related to their fears of immigration and cultural change. White Christian nationalism is also powerfully related with views that true patriots may need to resort to physical violence to save the nation, because they believe the current situation has become so dire.Whitehead elaborated in his own email:Racism is intimately intertwined with white Christian nationalism, and so the great replacement theory is a part of that intersection. We find in study after study that when white Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalism — an ethno-religious political ideology that advocates a close fusion between a particular expression of Christianity and American civic life — they are more likely to (1) fear a time in the future where whites are no longer the majority, (2) oppose interracial marriage, (3) oppose transracial adoption, (4) assume Black Americans are biologically inferior, (5) believe police violence toward Black Americans is warranted, and (6) show more tolerance for “old-fashioned racists” compared to other stigmatized groups.Joseph Baker, a sociologist at East Tennessee State University who together with Perry and Whitehead wrote the paper “Keep America Christian (and White): Christian Nationalism, Fear of Ethnoracial Outsiders, and Intention to Vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election,” noted:Christian nationalist views and xenophobia are very highly correlated with one another. Specifically, when Americans score highly on a comprehensive measure of xenophobia that includes perceptions of racial, economic, criminal, and cultural threat from immigrants, they nearly always also scored highly on a measure of Christian nationalism.Baker cited a statement issued in the summer of 2019 by James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, after Dobson visited the Mexican American border.Dobson’s statement:I can only report that without an overhaul of the law and the allocation of resources, millions of illegal immigrants will continue flooding to this great land from around the world. Many of them have no marketable skills. They are illiterate and unhealthy. Some are violent criminals. Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation. America has been a wonderfully generous and caring country since its founding. That is our Christian nature. But in this instance, we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it. And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen.Estimates of the number of Christian nationalists in this country vary widely. Baker wrote that “using a multi-item measure of whether people want to see Christianity privileged in political and public spheres, a good estimate is that about 20 percent of Americans are Christian nationalists, and another 25 percent or so are at least sympathetic to some aspects of these views.”Despite these high numbers, Baker argues, the percentage of Christian nationalists is declining as a proportion of the overall population, “along with white Protestantism more generally,” which may increase the likelihood of violent protests.The decline, Baker wrote,is helping to fuel the renewed fervor with which we are witnessing efforts to impose Christian nationalism. Because these views are necessarily rooted in perceptions of cultural threat, declining numbers further stoke the persecution complex that motivates Christian nationalism. So Christian nationalism’s numeric decline and cultural resurgence are, ironically, directly connected.This “cultural resurgence” and the political clout that comes with it will do nothing to diminish their ambition to restore an imagined past, by any means necessary.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Georgia Candidates Try to Outdo One Another on ‘Woke Mob’ in Schools

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      Georgia’s race for governor perfectly captures the degree to which the classroom has become a conservative battleground.On Sunday, the Republican candidates gathered for their third and final debate before the May 24 primary. Some promoted the lie that Donald Trump had won in 2020 and called for tighter election security (another way of articulating a desire to suppress votes). Several railed against Covid mandates (especially masks) and stoked fears of rising crime.There were the obligatory mentions of the “woke mob” and random mentions of George Soros. There was even a reference to “the communist, liberal, leftist agenda of the Green New Deal.” (One candidate suggested that the government was pushing Chinese solar panels on Georgia farmers as part of its “communist” agenda.)But, more than anything else, the supposed indoctrination of children in schools took center stage.I’m not sure that liberals and Democrats fully appreciate the degree to which Republicans are promoting parental rights as a way of wooing back some of the suburban white women who strayed from the party during the Trump years.Democrats wave their list of policies at voters like a self-satisfied child waves their homework. But instead of being met with praise and stickers, they are met by an electorate in which an alarming number frowns on fact and is electrified by emotions — fear, anger and envy.There were five candidates onstage during the debate, and four of the five — including the sitting governor, Brian Kemp, and his chief competitor, former Senator David Perdue — rattled on about classroom indoctrination.As Kemp put it: “We’re going to make sure that we pass a bill this year that our kids aren’t indoctrinated in the classroom. That we protect them from obscene materials and a lot of the other things.”Perdue followed up by going even further: “Right now, the No. 1 thing we can do for our teachers and our parents and most of all our children is to get the woke mob out of our schools in Georgia. I mean, that’s what’s happening right now. We have a war for the minds of our children. When they’re trying to teach first graders about gender choice, that’s the thing that we’ve got to stand up to.”On the debate stage, from left, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, former Senator David Perdue and Kandiss Taylor.Pool photo by Brynn AndersonAnother candidate, Kandiss Taylor, an educator herself, went further still. “We not only have C.R.T. and S.E.L. and comprehensive sex education teaching transgender perversion to our children,” she said, referring to critical race theory and social-emotional learning, “we also have anti-white racism that has not been addressed by the current administration. It has taken over our schools, and it’s ruining the students. It’s ruining the environment.”S.E.L. is a teaching technique that, research suggests, can boost academic performance. But it is a practice that conservatives view with suspicion, thinking it could abet lessons about race and gender. God forbid children should become more emotionally intelligent. Their empathy might grow, and with it a better understanding of others. In that way, I can understand why it would unnerve oppressors.In her closing comments, Taylor ratcheted up her inflammatory language: “We’re going to ensure that boys aren’t in our girls’ bathrooms and girls aren’t in our boys’ bathrooms, and people aren’t being raped. And we’re going to get rid of kindergarten teachers — men with beards and lipstick and high heels — teaching our children. We’re going to get back to being moral in Georgia.”As a white woman, and mother of three, Taylor is in the demographic that Republicans are trying to attract. But she is also a near-perfect encapsulation of the party’s fringe.During the debate, she chastised Kemp for not contesting the 2020 results in Georgia, saying: “Donald Trump won. He won. We have a fraudulent pedophile in the White House because Governor Kemp failed.” The idea that Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running the country is a central belief of QAnon.The day after the debate, Taylor tweeted a video with a caption that read in part: “I am the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal. Elect me governor of Georgia, and I will bring the Satanic Regime to its knees.”As ominous music plays in the background, she shifts from satanic cabals to human sacrifice, saying: “Back in biblical times, human sacrifice was a form of demonic worship. We’re still doing it, in present day, by killing our unborn. It’s the same demons. It’s the same sacrifice. It’s the same sin. It’s just a different time.”She is endorsed by Mike Lindell, the Trump-supporting MyPillow C.E.O., and L. Lin Wood, the Trump lawyer who spun ludicrous conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump.It might be tempting to laugh off people like Taylor as fringe candidates and thinkers, but Republicans have a way of folding those people’s ideas — scrubbed of the originators’ taint — into the mainstream. Even when the messenger is wrong, the party often views the message as right.Maybe the fact that the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade will dramatically alter the outcome of this year’s elections, pushing women — including many of the suburban white women Republicans are so desperate to win over — to vote against the Republicans in protest. Maybe.It could affect not only party alignments, but also turnout.But Republicans are more than a year into this parental rights campaign, so I doubt their strategy will be much altered. The question will be whether the oppression of women’s rights will outweigh what the Republicans are pushing: oppression as a parental right.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Emmanuel Macron Defeats Marine Le Pen for Second Term as French President

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      The result was a relief to allies in Europe and Washington wary of a far-right challenger who was hostile to the European Union and NATO.PARIS — Emmanuel Macron won a second term as president of France, triumphing on Sunday over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, after a campaign where his promise of stability prevailed over the temptation of an extremist lurch.Projections at the close of voting, which are generally reliable, showed Mr. Macron, a centrist, gaining 58.5 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 41.5 percent. His victory was much narrower than in 2017, when the margin was 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent for Ms. Le Pen, but wider than appeared likely two weeks ago.Speaking to a crowd massed on the Champ de Mars in front of a twinkling Eiffel Tower, a solemn Mr. Macron said his was a victory for “a more independent France and a stronger Europe.” He added: “Our country is riddled with so many doubts, so many divisions. We will have to be strong, but nobody will be left by the side of the road.”Ms. Le Pen conceded defeat in her third attempt to become president, but bitterly criticized the “brutal and violent methods” of Mr. Macron, without explaining what she meant. She vowed to fight on to secure a large number of representatives in legislative elections in June, declaring that “French people have this evening shown their desire for a strong counter power to Emmanuel Macron.”Mr. Macron addressed supporters in front of the Eiffel Tower after his victory.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesAt a critical moment in Europe, with fighting raging in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, France rejected a candidate hostile to NATO, to the European Union, to the United States, and to its fundamental values that hold that no French citizens should be discriminated against because they are Muslim.Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister, said the result reflected “the mobilization of French people for the maintenance of their values and against a narrow vision of France.”The French do not generally love their presidents, and none had succeeded in being re-elected since 2002, let alone by a 17-point margin. Mr. Macron’s unusual achievement in securing five more years in power reflects his effective stewardship over the Covid-19 crisis, his rekindling of the economy, and his political agility in occupying the entire center of the political spectrum.Ms. Le Pen, softening her image if not her anti-immigrant nationalist program, rode a wave of alienation and disenchantment to bring the extreme right closer to power than at any time since 1944. Her National Rally party has joined the mainstream, even if at the last minute many French people clearly voted for Mr. Macron to ensure that France not succumb to the xenophobic vitriol of the darker passages of its history.Ms. Le Pen is a longtime sympathizer with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom she visited at the Kremlin during her last campaign in 2017. She would almost certainly have pursued policies that weakened the united allied front to save Ukraine from Russia’s assault; offered Mr. Putin a breach to exploit in Europe; and undermined the European Union, whose engine has always been a joint Franco-German commitment to it.Marine Le Pen conceded to Mr. Macron, but bitterly criticized his “brutal and violent methods” without explaining what she meant.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIf Brexit was a blow to unity, a French nationalist quasi-exit, as set out in Ms. Le Pen’s proposals, would have left the European Union on life support. That, in turn, would have crippled an essential guarantor of peace on the continent in a volatile moment.Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, declared that Mr. Macron’s win was “a vote of confidence in Europe.” Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, congratulated the French leader and called France “one of our closest and most important allies.”Mr. Scholz and two other European leaders had taken the unusual step last week of making clear the importance of a vote against Ms. Le Pen in an opinion article in the daily newspaper Le Monde. The letter was a reflection of the anxiety in European capitals and Washington that preceded the vote.“It is the choice between a democratic candidate, who believes that France is stronger in a powerful and autonomous European Union, and a far-right candidate, who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and our democracy,” they wrote.Mr. Macron’s second victory felt different from his first. Five years ago, he was a 39-year-old wunderkind bursting on the French political scene with a promise to bury sterile left-right divisions and build a more just, equal, open and dynamic society. He organized a massive celebration in the main courtyard of the Louvre to mark the dawn of a new political era in France.Sunday night, given the war in Europe, he asked for sobriety from his supporters. As Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the European hymn, played (but much more softly than in 2017), he walked onto the Champ de Mars holding the hand of his wife, Brigitte. Children surrounded the couple; the choreography conveyed simplicity and humility.Supporters of Mr. Macron celebrated on the Champ de Mars.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMr. Macron has often been criticized for an aloofness bordering on arrogance during his first term.“We avoided a certain form of violence. I am relieved,” said Eric Maus, 64, a Macron supporter. “But I feel like I am handing my daughter an uncertain world where the extreme right scores so high.”Mr. Macron succeeded in spurring growth, slashing unemployment and instilling a start-up tech culture, but was unable to address growing inequality or simmering anger among the alienated and the struggling in areas of urban blight and rural remoteness. Societal divisions sharpened as incomes stagnated, prices rose and factories moved abroad.As a result, Mr. Macron’s political capital is more limited, even if his clear victory has saved France from a dangerous tilt toward xenophobic nationalism and given him momentum ahead of the June legislative elections.Still, many of the 7.7 million voters who had supported the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the presidential election on April 10 voted only reluctantly for Mr. Macron to keep Ms. Le Pen from power. Assina Channa, a Muslim of Algerian descent voting in the suburb of Saint-Denis north of Paris, said, “Nothing is going to change but I had no choice.”Ms. Le Pen had proposed a ban on the Muslim head scarf and has regularly equated Islam with violence in the country with the largest Muslim community in western Europe. “At least he doesn’t threaten us like she does,” Ms. Channa said.A polling station in Saint-Denis.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMr. Macron acknowledged that “many of our compatriots voted for me today not to support my ideas but to form a dam against the extreme right.” He thanked them and said “I am now entrusted with their sense of duty, their attachment to the Republic and their respect for the differences expressed these past weeks.”Some 28 percent of the electorate abstained, three percentage points higher than in 2017, and it appeared that more than 13 million people had voted for Ms. Le Pen and the extreme right. “The anger and the disagreements that led my compatriots to vote for this project must also find an answer,” Mr. Macron said.It was a speech not of soaring rhetoric but of sober realism, almost at times contrition, reflecting his recognition of a starkly divided France and perhaps also his inattention to those for whom life has been hardest.The dreams of radical change of 2017 have been supplanted by fears of political confrontation over the summer, in part because the dislike of Mr. Macron among his opponents is strong, and in part because the legislative elections in June could result in a National Assembly less pliant to his will.Constantly adjusting his positions, extending the circle of his allies and refining his ideas, Mr. Macron has proved himself a consummate politician, suffocating any would-be moderate challengers. He engineered the near total demise of the center-left Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans, the two political forces at the heart of postwar French politics. It was a remarkable feat.Supporters of Mr. Macron celebrating in Paris on Sunday.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesBut there was a price to pay for all this. The old structure of French politics has collapsed, and it is less clear how the violent conflicts of society can be mediated.Those conflicts have become more acute as anger has grown in the parts of France that have felt neglected, even forgotten, by the elites in major cities. By addressing these concerns, and promising a series of tax cuts to help people cope with rising prices for gas and electricity, Ms. Le Pen built an effective campaign.Her message, for some voters, was that she would care for and protect them while their president seemed to have other concerns. But her nationalist message also resonated among people angered by undocumented immigrants entering the country and seeking scapegoats for the country’s problems.The president’s problems have reflected both his personality and political choices. His highly personalized top-down style of government owed more to Bonaparte than to the democratic opening he had said he would bring to the French presidential system. His attempts to force march Europe toward a vision of “strategic autonomy” backed by its own integrated military has met resistance in the countries like Poland that are most attached to America as a European power.Emerging from the moderate left of the political system, and supported by many Socialists five years ago, Mr. Macron veered to the right both in his initial economic policy and in a much-criticized decision to confront what he called “Islamist separatism” by shutting down several mosques and Islamic associations — often on flimsy legal grounds.He judged that he had more to gain on the right than to fear on the fragmented left of the political spectrum in a country whose psyche has been deeply marked by several Islamist terrorist attacks since 2015. In a sense, his victory proved him correct, the master of a broad web of adjustable allegiances that left his opponents floundering.Aida Alami More

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      How Hated Is Macron? It Could Decide the French Election.

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      Given the choice between a president they suspect of despising ordinary people and a far-right candidate they detest, many French voters may stay home.LE HAVRE, France — As an ardent supporter of President Emmanuel Macron of France, Nicole Liot was all smiles after seeing him at a recent campaign stop. But she was also worried about the final round of the French election this Sunday. In her lifetime, she had never seen such intense dislike for a president among some French.“There are presidents who weren’t hated like this even though they weren’t saints,” Ms. Liot, 80, said, positing that what has become known as Mr. Macron’s “little phrases” fueled the aversion. “Like when he told someone, ‘You’re searching for a job? Just cross the street and you’ll find one.’”As anti-Macron protesters burned tires and blotted the sky with smoke over the northwestern city of Le Havre, Ms. Liot added, “Maybe people won’t forgive him for these mistakes of language and attitude.”No French president has been the object of such intense dislike among significant segments of the population as Mr. Macron — the result, experts say, of his image as an elitist out of touch with the ordinary French people whose pensions and work protections he has threatened in his efforts to make the economy more investor-friendly.Just how deep that loathing runs will be a critical factor — perhaps even the decisive one — in the election against his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen. Recent polls give Mr. Macron a lead of around 10 percentage points — wider than at some points in the campaign, but only a third of his winning margin five years ago.“Macron and the hatred he arouses is unprecedented,” said Nicolas Domenach, a veteran political journalist who has covered the past five French presidents and is the co-author of “Macron: Why So Much Hatred?,” a recently published book. “It stems from a particular alignment. He is the president of the rich and the president of disdain.”Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, at a meeting in Avignon.Daniel Cole/Associated PressNo doubt Mr. Macron could end up winning re-election despite his unpopularity. Even if a groundswell of voters does not turn out to vote for him, what matters for him is that enough voters come out to vote against her — to build a “dam” against the far right.It is a long-established strategy to erect a so-called “Republican front” against a political force — her party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front — that is seen as a threat to France’s democratic foundations.But given the choice between a president they find disdainful and a far-right candidate they find detestable, many French voters may just stay home, or even vote for Ms. Le Pen, tipping the scales in a close election.Every chance she gets, Ms. Le Pen has done her best to remind voters of “these terrible words” — “these words of disdain” — that now stick to Mr. Macron, as she did at a big campaign rally in the southern city of Avignon last week.“They are the words of a power without empathy,” she said as the crowd booed.Both she and Mr. Macron are now vying in the campaign’s closing days for the voters who cast ballots for other candidates in the first round of the presidential election on April 10, on whom the election now hinges.Waiting for Mr. Macron, while smoke from from tires set on fire as part of a protest against the president rose in the distance.James Hill for The New York TimesThe most critical bloc voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leftist who came in a strong third. On the left, many feel betrayed by Mr. Macron’s rightward tilt over the course of his presidency.Ms. Le Pen is trying especially to appeal to voters who feel the same emotions of hate and disdain so often heard among Ms. Le Pen’s core backers — many in Mr. Mélenchon’s camp.Roland Lescure, a lawmaker and spokesman for Mr. Macron’s party, La République en Marche, said he was convinced that “rejection for Marine Le Pen” would prove more potent than the dislike for the president, which he recognized.The rejection was not just of the person of Ms. Le Pen, he said, “but above all of an ideology, of a political history and of a platform, which, when one reads it, is extremely harmful.”But Ms. Le Pen has grown so confident in her widening appeal after taking calculated steps to soften her image that she has even dared seize the term “dam” for herself — beseeching voters six times in her rally to build a “dam against Macron.”The calls for dams on both sides underscored how the final vote boils down to an unpopularity contest: The less-disliked candidate wins.It is especially true in this race, which features the same finalists as in 2017. But if Ms. Le Pen was seen as a bulldozer of far-right ideology back then, in the current campaign she has tried to present a softer, more personable side.Mr. Macron meeting with voters on his way to the Museum of Modern Art André Malraux in Le Havre.James Hill for The New York TimesAnd if Mr. Macron was once seen as a fresh face who inspired many with his promises to change an ossified France, this time he has been cast by his haters as a kind of malign king.A former investment banker, whose tax policies have favored the wealthy, Mr. Macron has been unable to shake off his image as the president of the rich, even after his government provided massive subsidies during the pandemic.His “little phrases” over the years to or about regular folk have cemented that unsympathetic image, creating the kind of political and cultural schism opened by Hillary Clinton’s description of Donald J. Trump’s supporters in 2016 as “deplorables.”It has also not helped Mr. Macron that he barely bothered to campaign initially, absorbed in diplomacy around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also as part of a strategy to hold himself out of reach of his opponents.For many French, the approach only reinforced the impression of aloofness from a president who has concentrated powers in his own hands and considered campaigning beneath him.Voting in the first round of the presidential election in the Paris suburb of Trappes. Polls give Mr. Macron around a 10 percentage point lead in the second round.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAs Mr. Macron finally engages the race, he is now being confronted with the raw emotions that have shaped much of his presidency.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      In Call Before Jan. 6 Riot, a Plea to ‘Descend on the Capitol’

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      Days before Jan. 6, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr. told Trump backers to make lawmakers meeting to finalize the 2020 election results feel that “people are breathing down their necks.”One week before an angry mob stormed the Capitol, a communications expert named Jason Sullivan, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., joined a conference call with a group of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters and made an urgent plea.After assuring his listeners that the 2020 election had been stolen, Mr. Sullivan told them that they had to go to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day that Congress was to meet to finalize the electoral count — and “descend on the Capitol,” according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York Times.While Mr. Sullivan claimed that he was “not inciting violence or any kind of riots,” he urged those on the call to make their presence felt at the Capitol in a way that would intimidate members of Congress, telling the group that they had to ensure that lawmakers inside the building “understand that people are breathing down their necks.”He also pledged that Mr. Trump was going to take action on his own; the president, he said, was going to impose a form of martial law on Jan. 6 and would not be leaving office.“Biden will never be in that White House,” Mr. Sullivan declared. “That’s my promise to each and every one of you.”Before Riot, Operative Urged Trump Supporters to ‘Descend on the Capitol’ on Jan. 6In a conference call days before the Jan. 6 attack, Jason Sullivan, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., exhorted supporters of President Donald J. Trump to go to the Capitol that day and pressure lawmakers meeting to finalize the 2020 election results.The recording of the call, which took place on Dec. 30, 2020, emerged as the Justice Department has expanded its criminal investigation of the Capitol attack. It offers a glimpse of the planning that went on in the run-up to the storming of the Capitol and the mind-set of some of those who zeroed in on Jan. 6 as a kind of last stand for keeping Mr. Trump in office.It also reflects the complexities that federal prosecutors are likely to face as they begin the task of figuring out how much — or even whether — people involved in the political rallies that preceded the assault can be held accountable for the violence that erupted.After more than a year of focusing exclusively on rioters who took part in the storming of the Capitol, prosecutors have widened their gaze in recent weeks and have started to question whether those involved in encouraging protests — like the one that Mr. Sullivan was describing — can be held culpable for disrupting the work of Congress.Mr. Sullivan’s remarks during the call appeared to be an effort to motivate a group of people aggrieved by the election to take direct action against members of Congress on Jan. 6, presaging what Mr. Trump himself would say in a speech that day. While it remains unclear whether anyone on Mr. Sullivan’s call went on to join the mob that breached the Capitol, he seemed to be exhorting his listeners to apply unusual pressure on lawmakers just as they were overseeing the final count of Electoral College votes.In a statement provided by his lawyer, Mr. Sullivan played down the nature of the call, saying he had merely “shared some encouragement” with what he described as “people who all felt their votes had been disenfranchised in the 2020 elections.” Mr. Sullivan said he had been asked to participate in the call by a group of anti-vaccine activists — or what he called “health freedom advocate moms” — who were hosting “a small, permitted event” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.“I only promoted peaceful solutions where Americans could raise their voices and be heard as expressed in our First Amendment,” Mr. Sullivan said in the statement. “I in no way condone the violence of any protesters.”Still, in the recording of the call, Mr. Sullivan can be heard telling his listeners that the lawmakers inside the Capitol “need to feel pressure.”“If we make the people inside that building sweat and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing,” he said. “We have to put that pressure there.”As the Justice Department widens its inquiry, federal prosecutors are using a grand jury in Washington to gather information on political organizers, speakers and so-called V.I.P.s connected to a series of pro-Trump rallies after the 2020 election. One prominent planner of those rallies, Ali Alexander, received a subpoena from the grand jury and said last week that he intended to comply with its requests.In the run-up to Jan. 6, Mr. Alexander publicly discussed a pressure campaign against lawmakers that was meant to stop the final electoral count, saying he was working with Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama and Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, all Republicans.“We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Mr. Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope. The plan, he said, was to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”It is unclear if the Justice Department is aware of Mr. Sullivan’s conference call; the department declined to comment. The House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 was provided with a copy of the recording some months ago by the woman who made it, Staci Burk, a law student and Republican activist from Arizona.Shortly after the election, Ms. Burk became convinced that phony ballots had been flown in bulk into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. She eventually submitted an anonymous affidavit concerning the ballots in an election fraud case filed in Federal District Court in Phoenix by the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: New DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Macron Sets Out to Build a ‘Dam’ Against Le Pen. Can It Hold?

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      After Sunday’s vote, when nearly a third of ballots went to the extreme right, a united front of mainstream voters looked more precarious than ever. PARIS — A day after Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, emerged as his challenger for the final round of France’s presidential election in less than two weeks, President Emmanuel Macron immediately set about on Monday to build the “dam.”Dams are the mainstream French voters who, time and again, have put political differences aside in the second round and voted for anyone but a Le Pen in a so-called “Republican front” to deny the far right the presidency.But after Sunday’s first round, when 32 percent of French voters supported candidates on the extreme right — a record — the dam may be more precarious than ever.Mr. Macron, widely criticized for a listless campaign, moved quickly Monday to shore it up, directly challenging Ms. Le Pen and her party, the National Rally, in the economically depressed north where she dominated Sunday.In Denain, a city won by Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Macron spoke of the worries of the youth in Denain and other social issues. He tried to remind voters of the extremist roots of Ms. Le Pen’s party, referring to it by its old name, the National Front.At a campaign stop of her own in a rural area, Yonne, Ms. Le Pen said that the dam was a dishonest strategy to win an election, adding that “it’s a way to save yourself when you don’t deserve it.’’In a triumphant speech against the majestic backdrop of the Louvre Museum five years ago, Mr. Macron had launched his presidency by pledging to unite the French so that there would be “no reason at all to vote for the extremes.’’But in addition to Ms. Le Pen’s second-place finish, with 23 percent of the vote, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist veteran, won 22 percent of Sunday’s votes to finish a strong third. Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters — split in their attitudes toward Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen — could now help determine the election’s final outcome on April 24.Outside a small market in Amiens, France, in March. Mr. Macron quickly moved Monday to challenge Ms. Le Pen in the economically depressed north where he lost to her even in Amiens, his hometown.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesAfter five years of Mr. Macron, who trounced Ms. Le Pen in the 2017 runoff, the far-right leader emerged stronger than ever. She has softened her image in a successful process of “undemonizing’’ and focused relentlessly on ordinary voters’ economic hardship.In Yonne, Ms. Le Pen hammered away at the themes that carried her through to the second round. Meeting with a cereal farmer, she spoke of how rising prices of fuel and fertilizers following the war in Ukraine would raise the cost of staples at supermarkets and hurt the most vulnerable.The far right’s record performance on Sunday resulted from a combination of factors, including Ms. Le Pen’s own efforts to revamp her image, a successful cultural battle waged by conservative forces in recent years, and a series of Islamist attacks in France since 2015. But critics say that it also reflected Mr. Macron’s continued strategy of triangulating France’s electoral landscape. While Mr. Macron was regarded as a center-left candidate five years ago, he shifted rightward during his presidency, sensing that his main challenge would come from Ms. Le Pen. That shift was embodied by a series of laws toughening France’s stance on immigration, empowering the police, and combating Islamist extremism. Many working French also felt that his economic policies unfairly favored the rich and have left them more adrift.If Mr. Macron’s intention was to defuse Ms. Le Pen’s appeal by stripping her of her core issues, critics say the approach backfired by ushering the talking points of the far right deeper into the mainstream political debate. Then, Ms. Le Pen also shifted her message to pocketbook issues that have now resonated even more broadly as energy prices spike because of the war in Ukraine.Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker and a spokesman for Mr. Macron’s campaign, said that the president was aiming to strengthen the dam strategy. He acknowledged that there have been “some mistakes” and “blunders,” noting that some government ministers had picked up themes and expressions promoted by the far right. Supporters of Ms. Le Pen singing the national anthem at her rally after voting results were announced on Sunday. Mr. Macron has described the far-right leader as a danger to French democracy.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut Mr. Houlié denied that Mr. Macron had normalized far-right ideas, saying his government had mainly tried to respond to people’s growing concerns on crime and immigration. “We cannot sweep the dust under the carpet,” he said, referring to the issues. But many, especially Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters of the left, feel so betrayed that Mr. Macron may have a harder time in this next election persuading them to join his call for unity by building a dam against Ms. Le Pen, whom the president has called a danger to democracy. Alexis Lévrier, a historian who has written about Mr. Macron’s relations with the news media, said that as Mr. Macron tried to reshape French politics around a strict divide between his mainstream movement and Ms. Le Pen, he “contributed to the rise in power of the far right.” Unwittingly, “he’s a pyromaniac firefighter,” Mr. Lévrier said.A resident of Guyancourt — a well-off, left-leaning city southwest of Paris where Mr. Mélenchon came in first Sunday — Stéphanie Noury said that, in 2017, she gave Mr. Macron her vote as part of a dam against the far right. But this time, she planned to stay home for the final round.“Macron played into the hands of the extreme right,’’ said Ms. Noury, 55, a human resources manager who voted Sunday for Mr. Mélenchon. “He told himself that he would always win against the extreme right.’’Compared to 2017, Ms. Le Pen’s share of the first-round vote went up by a couple of percentage points despite the direct challenge of a new rival, the far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour, who urged his supporters to vote for Ms. Le Pen in the upcoming showdown.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Zemmour and a third far-right candidate, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, together got 32 percent of the vote. In 2017, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Dupont-Aignan collected 26 percent in the first round.Ms. Le Pen meeting supporters at a rally in Stiring-Wendel, France, on April 1. The far-right candidate has sought to soften her image.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesVoters first formed a dam against the extreme right in 2002 when Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the political establishment by making it into a runoff against Jacques Chirac. Another dam helped defeat Ms. Le Pen in 2017.To gain credibility on the right, in 2019, Mr. Macron gave his first long interview on the sensitive issues of immigration and Islam to Valeurs Actuelles, a magazine that straddles the right and far right.“By talking to us, Emmanuel Macron came to seek some legitimacy on these subjects, from right-wing people who felt he was doing nothing,” said Geoffroy Lejeune, the publication’s editor. “He knows that by doing this, he’s sending a big signal.” Aurélien Taché, a lawmaker once allied with Mr. Macron, said the president was elected in 2017 thanks to voters who put aside their political differences and united against Ms. Le Pen. He said Mr. Macron should have taken those votes — mainly from the left — into account in his policies afterward.“He did not consider them,” he said, adding that Mr. Macron instead worked to “set up this cleavage’’ between him and Ms. Le Pen, leading to a “high-risk rematch.”“There have been, on a whole range of topics, very strong concessions made to the far right,” Mr. Taché said, also citing tougher immigration rules and the application of a stricter version of French secularism, called laïcité.A migrant family waiting for emergency accommodation with a host family in front of the Paris City Hall last year. Some allies distanced themselves from Mr. Macron after he toughened his stance on immigration.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut Mr. Taché, who quit Mr. Macron’s party in 2020 over the president’s shift to the right, was especially critical of the government’s landmark law against separatism, which has been criticized inside and outside France, including by the U.S. envoy on international religious freedom. The law amounted to “making Islam and Muslims invisible,” Mr. Taché said. Some academics, political opponents and Muslim organizations have also criticized the law as discriminating against French Muslims by leading to the widespread closing of mosques, Muslim associations and schools.That resentment may now also complicate Mr. Macron’s dam-building effort. To be re-elected this time, for instance, he will have to persuade voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population southwest of Paris, to join the dam against Ms. Le Pen. A longtime stronghold of Mélenchon supporters, Trappes strongly backed Mr. Macron in the 2017 runoff. But comments by voters Sunday suggested that the dam might not be as effective this time. Frédéric Renan, 47, a computer programmer, said he would abstain or cast a blank vote in a showdown between Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen.“Macron opened the door to the extreme right,’’ Mr. Renan said, adding that the president’s economic policies hurt the poor and fueled the rise of the far right. “I don’t see how voting for Macron is a vote in a dam against the extreme right,” he said. “Some people will say that not participating in the dam against the extreme right is irresponsible, that the threat of the extreme right is greater than what Emmanuel Macron proposes, but I’m not convinced.’’The Islamic Center of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in Trappes, a Paris suburb, on Sunday. To be re-elected, Mr. Macron will need to woo voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAdèle Cordonnier More

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      Macron to Face Le Pen for President as French Gravitate Toward Extremes

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      President Emmanuel Macron and the hard-right leader Marine Le Pen will compete for a second time in a runoff on April 24.PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, in the runoff of France’s presidential elections.With 92 percent of the ballots cast on Sunday counted, Mr. Macron, a centrist, was leading with about 27.4 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 24.3 percent. Ms. Le Pen benefited from a late surge that reflected widespread disaffection over rising prices, security and immigration.With war raging in Ukraine and Western unity likely to be tested as the fighting continues, Ms. Le Pen’s strong performance demonstrated the enduring appeal of nationalist and xenophobic currents in Europe. Extreme parties of the right and left took some 51 percent of the vote, a clear sign of the extent of French anger and frustration.An anti-NATO and more pro-Russia France in the event of an ultimate Le Pen victory would cause deep concern in allied capitals, and could fracture the united trans-Atlantic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.But Mr. Macron, after a lackluster campaign, will go into the second round as the slight favorite, having fared a little better than the latest opinion polls suggested. Some had shown him leading Ms. Le Pen by just two points.Marine Le Pen speaking after the first-round results were announced on Sunday.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesThe principled French rejection of Ms. Le Pen’s brand of anti-immigrant nationalism has frayed as illiberal politics have spread in both Europe and the United States. She has successfully softened her packaging, if not her fierce conviction that French people must be privileged over foreigners and that the curtain must be drawn on France as a “land of immigration.”Ms. Le Pen’s ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are close, although she has scrambled in recent weeks to play them down. This month, she was quick to congratulate Viktor Orban, Hungary’s nationalist and anti-immigrant leader, on his fourth consecutive victory in parliamentary elections.“I will restore France to order in five years,” Ms. Le Pen declared to cheering supporters, appealing to all French people to join her in what she called “a choice of civilization” in which the “legitimate preponderance of French language and culture” would be guaranteed and full “sovereignty reestablished in all domains.”The choice confronting French people on April 24 was between “division, injustice and disorder” on the one hand, and the “rallying of French people around social justice and protection,” she said.Mr. Macron told flag-waving supporters: “I want a France in a strong Europe that maintains its alliances with the big democracies in order to defend itself, not a France that, outside Europe, would have as its only allies the populist and xenophobic International. That is not us.”He added: “Don’t deceive ourselves, nothing is decided, and the debate we will have in the next 15 days is decisive for our country and for Europe.”A polling station in Pontoise on Sunday.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesLast week, in an interview in the daily Le Parisien newspaper, Mr. Macron called Ms. Le Pen “a racist” of “great brutality.” Ms. Le Pen hit back, saying that the president’s remarks were “outrageous and aggressive.” She called favoring French people over foreigners “the only moral, legal and admissible policy.”The gloves will be off as they confront each other over the future of France, at a time when Britain’s exit from the European Union and the end of Angela Merkel’s long chancellorship in Germany have placed a particular onus on French leadership.Mr. Macron wants to transform Europe into a credible military power with “strategic autonomy.” Ms. Le Pen, whose party has received funding from a Russian and, more recently, a Hungarian bank, has other priorities.The runoff, on April 24, will be a repeat of the last election, in 2017, when Mr. Macron, then a relative newcomer to politics intent on shattering old divisions between left and right, trounced Ms. Le Pen with 66.9 percent of the vote to her 33.1 percent.The final result this time will almost certainly be much closer than five years ago. Polls taken before Sunday’s vote indicated Mr. Macron winning by just 52 percent to 48 percent against Ms. Le Pen in the second round. That could shift in the coming two weeks, when the candidates will debate for the first time in the campaign.Reflecting France’s drift to the right in recent years, no left-of-center candidate qualified for the runoff. The Socialist Party, long a pillar of postwar French politics, collapsed, leaving Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left anti-NATO candidate with his France Unbowed movement, to take third place with about 21 percent.Supporters of Mr. Macron in Paris on Sunday.James Hill for The New York TimesMs. Le Pen, who leads the National Rally, formerly the National Front, was helped by the candidacy of Éric Zemmour, a fiercely xenophobic TV pundit turned politician, who became the go-to politician for anti-immigrant provocation, which made her look more mainstream and innocuous. In the end, Mr. Zemmour’s campaign faded, and he took about 7 percent of the vote.Mr. Zemmour immediately called on his supporters to back Ms. Le Pen in the second round. “Opposing Ms. Le Pen there is a man who allowed 2 million immigrants to enter France,” Mr. Zemmour declared.The threatening scenario for Mr. Macron is that Mr. Zemmour’s vote will go to Ms. Le Pen, and that she will be further bolstered by the wide section of the left that feels betrayed or just viscerally hostile toward the president, as well as by some center-right voters for whom immigration is the core issue.More than half of French people — supporters of Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Zemmour and Mr. Mélenchon — now appear to favor parties that are broadly anti-NATO, anti-American and hostile to the European Union. By contrast, the broad center — Mr. Macron’s La République en Marche party, the Socialist Party, the center right Republicans and the Green Party — took a combined total of about 40 percent.These were numbers that revealed the extent of anxiety in France, and perhaps also the extent of distrust of its democracy. They will be more comforting to Ms. Le Pen than to Mr. Macron, even if Mr. Mélenchon said his supporters should not give “a single vote” to Ms. Le Pen.He declined, however, to endorse Mr. Macron.At Ms. Le Pen’s headquarters, Frederic Sarmiento, an activist, said, “She will benefit from a big transfer of votes,” pointing to supporters of Mr. Zemmour, but also some on the left who, according to polls, will support Ms. Le Pen in the second round.Immigrant families awaiting emergency accommodation outside the Paris city hall last April.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times“I am very worried, it will be a very close runoff,” said Nicolas Tenzer, an author who teaches political science at Sciences Po university. “Many on the left will abstain rather than vote Macron.”Mr. Macron gained the immediate support for the second round of the defeated Socialist, Communist, Green and center-right candidates, but between them they amounted to no more than 15 percent of the first-round vote. He may also benefit from a late surge in support of the Republic in a country with bitter wartime experience of extreme-right rule.In the end, the election on Sunday came down to Mr. Macron against the extreme right and left of the political spectrum, a sign of his effective dismantlement of the old political order. Now built essentially around a personality — the restless president — French democracy does not appear to have arrived at any sustainable alternative structure.If the two runoff qualifiers are the same as in 2017, they have been changed by circumstances. Where Mr. Macron represented reformist hope in 2017, he is now widely seen as a leader who drifted to the right and a top-down, highly personalized style of government. The sheen is off him.On the place of Islam in France, on immigration controls and on police powers, Mr. Macron has taken a hard line, judging that the election would be won or lost to his right.Addressing his supporters after the vote Sunday, he said he wants a France that “fights resolutely against Islamist separatism” — a term he uses to describe conservative or radical Muslims who reject French values like gender equality — but also a France that allows all believers to practice their faiths.A polling place at the Versailles town hall.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesHis rightward shift had a cost. The center-left, once the core of his support, felt betrayed. To what extent the left will vote for him in the second round will be a main source of concern, as already reflected in Mr. Macron’s abrupt recent catch-up paeans to “fraternity,” “solidarity” and equality of opportunity.Throughout the campaign, Mr. Macron appeared disengaged, taken up with countless telephone calls to Mr. Putin that proved ineffectual.A comfortable lead in polls disappeared in recent weeks as resentment grew over the president’s detachment. He had struggled during the five years of his presidency to overcome an image of aloofness, learning to reach out to more people, only to suffer an apparent relapse in the past several weeks.Still, Mr. Macron steered the country through the long coronavirus crisis, brought unemployment to its lowest level in a decade and lifted economic growth. Doing so, he has convinced many French people that he has what it takes to lead and to represent France with dignity on the world stage.Ms. Le Pen, who would be France’s first woman president, is also seen differently. Now in her third attempt to become president — Jacques Chirac won in 1995 after twice failing — she bowed to reason (and popular opinion) on two significant fronts: dropping her prior vows to take France out of the European Union and the eurozone. Still, many of her proposals — like barring E.U. citizens from some of the same social benefits as French citizens — would infringe fundamental European treaties.The leader of the National Rally, formerly the National Front, toned down her language to look more “presidential.” She smiled a lot, opening up about her personal struggles, and she gave the impression of being closer to the day-to-day concerns of French people, especially with regard to sharply rising gas prices and inflation.But many things did not change. Her program includes a plan to hold a referendum that would lead to a change in the Constitution that would ban any policies that lead to “the installation on national territory of a number of foreigners so large that it would change the composition and identity of the French people.”She also wants to bar Muslim women from wearing head scarves and fine them if they do.Polling booths in Trappes on Sunday. The first round of voting saw the highest abstention rate in decades.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesThe abstention rate Sunday, at between about 26 and 28 percent, was several points above the last election. Not since 2002 has it been so high.This appeared to reflect disillusionment with politics as a change agent, the ripple effect of the war in Ukraine and lost faith in democracy. It was part of the same anger that pushed so many French people toward political extremes.Aurelien Breeden More